Is it, then, written in this spirit of reality? In proof that it is so, I call to witness the most poignant reproach, save one, ever uttered against it by a superior man. Novalis censured it as "thoroughly modern and prosaic." Well, on one side, it is so,—just as modern and prosaic as the modern world and actual European civilization. What is this but to say that Goethe faces the facts? What is it but to say that he accepts the conditions of his problem? He is to show that the high possibilities of growth can be realized here. To run off, get up a fancy world, and then picture these possibilities as coming to fruition there, would be a mere toying with his readers. Here is modern civilization, with its fixed forms, its rigid limits, its traditional mechanisms. Here is this life, where men make, execute, and obey laws, own and manage property, buy and sell, plant, sail, build, marry and beget children and maintain households, pay taxes, keep out of debt, if they are wise, and go to the poorhouse, or beg, or do worse, if they are unwise or unfortunate. Here such trivialities as starched collars, blacked boots, and coats according to the mode compel attention. Society has its fixed rules, by which it enforces social continuity and connection. To neglect these throws one off the ring; and, with rare exceptions, isolation is barrenness and death. One cannot even go into the street in a wilfully strange costume, without establishing repulsions and balking relations between him and his neighbors which destroy their use to each other. Every man is bound to the actual form of society by his necessities at least, if not by his good-will.
To step violently out of all this puts one in a social vacuum,—a position in which few respire well, while most either perish or become in some degree monstrous. It is necessary that one should live and work with his fellows, if he is to obtain the largest growth. On the other hand, to be merely in and of this—a wheel, spoke, or screw, in this vast social mechanism—makes one, not a man, but a thing, and precludes all growth but such as is obscure and indirect. Thousands, indeed, have no desire but to obtain some advantageous place in this machinery. Meanwhile this enormous conventional civilization strives, and must strive, to make every soul its puppet. Let each fall into the routine, pursue it in some shining manner, asking no radical questions, and he shall have his heart's desire. "Blessed is he," it cries, "who handsomely and with his whole soul reads upwards from man to position and estate,—from man to millionnaire, judge, lord, bishop! Cursed is he who questions, who aims to strike down beneath this great mechanism, and to connect himself with the primal resources of his being! There are no such resources. It is a wickedness to dream of them. Man has no root but in tradition and custom, no blessing but in serving them."
As that assurance is taken, and as that spirit prevails, man forfeits his manhood. His life becomes mechanical. Ideas disappear in the forms that once embodied them; imagination is buried beneath symbol; belief dies of creed, and morality of custom. Nothing remains but a world-wide pantomime. Worship itself becomes only a more extended place-hunting, and man the walking dummy of society. And then, since man no longer is properly vitalized, disease sets in, consumption, decay, putrefaction, filling all the air with the breath of their foulness.
The earlier part of the eighteenth century found all Europe in this stage. Then came a stir in the heart of man: for Nature would not let him die altogether. First came recoil, complaint, reproach, mockery. Voltaire's light, piercing, taunting laugh—with a screaming wail inside it, if one can hear well—rang over Europe. "Aha, you are found out! Up, toad, in your true shape!" Then came wild, shallow theories, half true; then wild attempt to make the theories real; then carnage and chaos.
Accompanying and following this comes another and purer phase of reaction. "Let us get out of this dead, conventional world!" cry a few noble spirits, in whose hearts throbs newly the divine blood of life. "Leave it behind; it is dead. Leave behind all formal civilization; let us live only from within, and let the outward be formless,—momentarily created by our souls, momentarily vanishing."
The noblest type I have ever known of this extra-vagance, this wandering outside of actual civilization, was Thoreau. With his purity, as of a newborn babe,—with his moral steadiness, unsurpassed in my observation,—with his indomitable persistency,—by the aid also of that all-fertilizing imaginative sympathy with outward Nature which was his priceless gift,—he did, indeed, lend to his mode of life an indescribable charm. In him it came at once to beauty and to consecration.
Yet even he must leave out marriage, to make his scheme of life practicable. He must ignore Nature's demand that humanity continue, or recognize it only with loathing. "Marriage is that!" said he to a friend,—and held up a carrion-flower.
Moreover, the success of his life—nay, the very quality of his being—implied New England and its civilization. To suppose him born among the Flathead Indians were to suppose him, the Thoreau of our love and pride, unborn still. The civilization he slighted was an air that he breathed; it was implied, as impulse and audience, in those books of his, wherein he enshrined his spirit, and whereby he kept its health.
A fixed social order is indirectly necessary even to him who, by rare gifts of Nature, can stand nobly and unfalteringly aside from it. And it is directly, instantly necessary to him who, either by less power of self-support or by a more flowing human sympathy, must live with men, and must comply with the conditions by which social connection is preserved.
The problem, therefore, recurs. Here are the two terms: the soul, the primal, immortal imagination of man, on the one side; the enormous, engrossing, dehumanizing mechanism of society, on the other. A noble few elect the one; an ignoble multitude pray to its opposite. The reconciling word,—is there a reconciling word?